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Science X Newsletter Friday, Apr 3

Dear ymilog,

Here is your customized Science X Newsletter for April 3, 2020:

Due to an increasing volume of information and news about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, we have split stories concerning the virus into a separate category in the MedicalXpress daily newsletter. As always, you may configure your email newsletter preferences in your ScienceX account.

A team of researchers from Germany, the Netherlands and Italy has developed a way to use scattered light to map nerve fiber pathway crossing points in the brain. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes their work with light scattering in transmission microscopy and what it revealed in the human brain.

Particle chasing—it's a game that so many physicists play. Sometimes the hunt takes place inside large supercolliders, where spectacular collisions are necessary to find hidden particles and new physics. For physicists studying solids, the game occurs in a much different environment and the sought-after particles don't come from furious collisions. Instead, particle-like entities, called quasiparticles, emerge from complicated electronic interactions that happen deep within a material. Sometimes the quasiparticles are easy to probe, but others are more difficult to spot, lurking just out of reach.

A hospitable star that doesn't kill you with deadly flares. A rocky planet with liquid water and an agreeable climate. Absence of apocalyptic asteroid storms. No pantheon of angry, vengeful and capricious gods. These are the things that define a habitable planet.

The coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has virtually paralyzed daily life as we know it. Even when the spread of this highly infectious disease has been stemmed, the world will face huge challenges getting back to normal. To help support experts working in Europe's research centers and technical organizations during these unprecedented times, ESA has issued two new initiatives related to understanding the effects that COVID-19 is imposing on society, the economy and the environment.

Animal behaviors and the biological mechanisms underpinning them are among the greatest sources of inspiration for robotics studies. Over the past decade or so, countless research teams at universities and companies worldwide have been trying to develop robots that recreate the behaviour or structure of specific animal species.

New privacy laws like Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have spawned a new industry of companies and platforms advertising that they can anonymize your data and be compliant with the law.

Frustrated with spotty WiFi connection? Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a "smart surface" that could make signal available in dead spots—and also make the existing connection twice as fast.

Google has announced a change to its Arts & Culture app—now, instead of just searching for paintings that resemble selfies, users can have their photographs reinterpreted as if they had been painted by a famous artist. Called Art Transfer, the app gives users an entirely unique way to view photographs they have taken.

"It's good to hear your voice, you know it's been so long If I don't get your calls, then everything goes wrong… Your voice across the line gives me a strange sensation" — Blondie, "Hanging on the Telephone"

Tesla's sales of its increasingly popular electric cars got off to fast start this year, even though the company had to slam the brakes along with other major automakers last month because of worldwide efforts to contain the worst pandemic in a century.

In response to a pressing need for more ventilators to treat critically ill COVID-19 patients, a team led by Johns Hopkins University engineers is developing and prototyping a 3-D-printed splitter that will allow a single ventilator to treat multiple patients. Though medical professionals have expressed concerns about the safety and effectiveness of sharing ventilators, the team has designed this tool to address those concerns.

A new autonomous robot developed by engineers at NASA and tested in Antarctica by a team of researchers, including an engineer from The University of Western Australia, is destined for a trip into outer space and could, in the future, search for signs of life in ocean worlds beyond Earth.

While some sectors of the economy struggle for survival in a sudden, new, harsh reality, e-commerce is again faced with massive demand. With many of us confined to our homes, we have become reliant on online shopping. And while your weekly grocery shop or a book order might seem to have changed little in recent years, there is great innovation in e-commerce.

The advent of the Internet of Thing, essentially smart devices with connectivity to the internet has wrought many benefits, but with it comes the problem of how to cope with third party users with malicious or criminal intent.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin are building a new type of ventilator made of cheap, widely available materials to help fill the demand created by the spread of COVID-19 for these critical devices that help patients breathe.

Over 26,000 megawatts (MW) of planned offshore wind capacity exists in the offshore wind development pipeline. Rapidly falling technology costs for offshore wind, including floating offshore wind technology, have aided the growth of this pipeline and promise to help wind become a significant part of the power mix in coastal communities.

Researchers at Linköping University, together with colleagues in China, have developed a tiny unit that is both an optical transmitter and a receiver. "This is highly significant for the miniaturisation of optoelectronic systems," says LiU professor Feng Gao.

BMW is following other German carmakers in pumping up its financial liquidity to ride out the coronavirus crisis, its chief executive said Friday, as car sales in the auto-mad nation booked their steepest plunge in almost 30 years in March.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI), technologies that can interact with the environment and simulate human intelligence, has the potential to significantly change the way we work. Successfully integrating AI into organizations depends on workers' level of trust in the technology. A new review examined two decades of research on how people develop trust in AI. The authors concluded that the way AI is represented, or "embodied," and AI's capabilities contribute to developing trust. They also proposed a framework that addresses the elements that shape users' cognitive and emotional trust in AI, which can help organizations that use it.

The U.S. government's efforts to clean up Cold War-era waste from nuclear research and bomb making at federal sites around the country has lumbered along for decades, often at a pace that watchdogs and other critics say threatens public health and the environment.

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